Nine Days in Another Man's Shed

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town two men lost the same share of every kiln they fired, and one of them stopped in a fortnight.

Two potters in one town, the same clay out of the same field.
Both fired the same ware in kilns built to the same plan.
Both lost a third of every load, cracked or dull at the back.
One of them went away for nine days and paid for the going.
Same fault in both, and only one still had it at Christmas.
Which of the two had the cheaper education?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two potters in the town I have never named. Both threw on a kick wheel, both dug from the field beyond the brickyard, both fired a bottle kiln behind the shop, and both sold the brown ware the parish ate its dinner off. And each of them, every firing, drew a third of the load out spoiled, dull at the back, a few cracked on the cooling, the whole lot going on the heap that every potter in the kingdom keeps by his wall.

The second potter held that a third was simply the trade. Clay is clay and fire is fire, and a man who cannot stand a loss should be a draper. Still, he meant to beat it, and worked the only way he knew: one change each firing, carefully watched. He set the ware further forward. He packed looser. He fired four hours longer, and spent nine shillings of coal learning that four hours longer cracks a crock. He kept at it honestly, on his own ware and his own coal, for four years, and got his losses to about a fifth.

The first potter did the sum instead. A third of a load was, by his reckoning, twelve pounds a year in clay, coal and labour. So in the February, the dead month in pots, he shut the shop, took the carrier forty miles into the next county, and presented himself at a pottery selling to a market he would never touch. He offered two pounds and nine days of work for nothing: sweeping, wedging clay, carrying saggars. In exchange he asked one thing, written down so there could be no mistake. Leave to ask why.

So he swept that shed for nine days, and every time a hand did something his own hands did differently he asked why and wrote the answer down. There were four answers. One was not small at all, and it concerned the setting of the ware against the draught at the back of the oven, which that family had never thought of as knowledge, it being simply how you set a kiln. He came home, fired in the March, and drew a load with four pieces spoiled instead of thirty.

Mark the two sums. The first man paid two pounds and nine days of sweeping. The second paid four years, and never noticed, because it came out of his losses and not his pocket.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

What somebody can tell you in an afternoon should never be bought with four years of your own trial. Experience is the finest teacher of what nobody knows yet, and the dearest imaginable of what is already known and sitting in another man's hands.

You have heard all your life that there is no substitute for learning the hard way, and in the main it is true, which is what makes it dangerous. It is true of one kind of gap and false of another, and the art is in telling them apart. Here is the test. Could the answer be written on one page and followed by somebody who has never done the thing? If it could, you have a knowledge gap, and a knowledge gap is a purchase. The proportion, the sequence, the setting, the clause the trade always puts in: all of it exists already, finished, in another head.

If a man could tell you plainly and you still could not do it tomorrow, you have a skill gap instead, and skill is not for sale at any price. It is bought in repetitions, and bought best on your own material, on purpose, in hours nobody is paying you for. The error that costs trades most is treating the first kind as the second: a man grinds four years at something he could have been told, and calls it dedication.

Now, why so few people buy. Not meanness. It is that the price of being taught is visible and the price of teaching yourself is not. Two pounds goes in the book, on a line, with a date beside it, and a man must look at it. Four years of a spoiled third appears nowhere. It is scattered across forty-eight firings, mixed in with the weather and the clay and the general difficulty of life, and nobody adds it up. The dearest expenses of a trade arrive without a bill.

The second reason is pride, which dresses itself up as thrift. To pay a man to teach you is to say out loud that he knows something you do not, and most would sooner lose four years than say it to a stranger. Note who to ask, too. Not the man across your street, who has every reason to say nothing, but somebody forty miles off, in a market next door to yours rather than in it, or retired from the trade altogether. The retired master is the cheapest knowledge in the kingdom, delighted to be asked, with nothing left to protect.

Be clear, finally, about what you are buying. Not a watch over a wall, but the right to ask why. Go with the questions written down.

Two cautions. Much of what is sold as teaching is encouragement with a fee attached; the test is not whether a man is impressive but whether he has done this particular thing, lately, for money, and will let you watch him do it, since what any adviser is worth depends on what it costs him to be wrong. And buy the step rather than the trade. You went for the setting of the kiln. A man who asks to be taught everything comes home with a method that fits a shop he does not own.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. What are you teaching yourself the slow way? Write the gap as one sentence. If it will not go into one, you do not have a question, you have a worry, and nobody can answer a worry.
2. Can it be written on a page? If yes, it is for sale somewhere and you should be buying it. If no, stop hunting a teacher and start booking the repetitions.
3. Who already knows? Name three. Cross off anybody competing for the same customers. Of those left, the one who loses least by telling you is the one to write to first.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which of the two had the cheaper education?

The first, by a distance that is almost comic. He paid two pounds and nine days of sweeping. The other paid some forty pounds of spoiled ware to arrive, four years later, at a worse answer than his neighbour carried home in a notebook. Both believed they were careful with money. Only one had counted it.

The verse:

The years you spend on what is known
are years you throw away,
for somewhere there is someone who
would tell you in a day.

Until next time. Go and write down, in one sentence, the thing you have been working out by trial, and the name of one man who already knows it.

P.S. Offer labour before you offer money. A fee makes him a supplier, guarded about what he hands over; a week of your hands in his shop makes you useful, and useful men get told things that paying men never hear. It is also the only arrangement under which you see what he does on an ordinary Tuesday, which is where the four answers are.

Also in the archive: The Hour in the Cooper's Yard, The Half-Page He Did Not Buy and Eleven Things in March.